His business model, being the publishing equivalent of the chippy boy in the playground who yanks smaller girls’ hair until he causes enough irritation to get noticed, worked a treat for a while, writes Wendy Tuohy.AAP Image - Joel Carrett

His business model, being the publishing equivalent of the chippy boy in the playground who yanks smaller girls' hair until he causes enough irritation to get noticed, worked a treat for a while, but then his targets (mainly women), realised steering clear of needy pests works best.

Milo's support for relationships between old men and children has cost him dearly.

A foreigner who operates along similar lines, one about to visit, is lanyard-loving tech geek turned home-bleached prince of hate speech, Milo Yiannopoulos.

Like Latham, he is a would-be oxygen thief who managed to steal quite a bit, for a while, by working up a formula to manufacture outrage. Columns with titles like Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy will do that for you.

In the breathless quest for notoriety that is the lot of the "professional provocateurs", Yiannopoulos reaches for all the performance enhancers.

He has said ugly, fat people should be deported, called feminism cancer and Islam "AIDS", and warned "never trust lesbians" (he is gay, but called a US speaking tour Dangerous Faggot).

Latham's attempts to minimise the severity of domestic violence have not gone over well with Australians.Facebook

He has as good as confessed he, too, has no idea what he's really on about or where his comments come from, saying things such as, "I didn't like me very much and so I created this comedy character. And now they've converged", and "I'm totally autistic or sociopathic. I guess I'm both".

The outspoken Trump supporter and former editor at the far-right Breitbart news site rode his clever PR wave until a podcast emerged this year of him appearing to endorse sex between older men and boys as young as 13. He said this could be a "coming-of-age" relationship in which "those older men help those young boys discover who they are".

He promptly lost the book contract with Simon and Shuster about which he and his cheerleaders had been gloating, had an appearance at the American Conservative Union's annual CPAC conference cancelled and left Breitbart.

Now, he's on his way here and fellow travellers in commentariat's version of Stranger Things' "The Upside Down" such as Latham are doing their best to try to ramp up publicity for Yiannopoulos by pretending people here take him seriously enough to bother protesting.

Latham jumped on a petition with less than 1000 signatures on it calling for Yiannopoulos not to get a visa, attempting to portray such scant attention as significant.

Yiannopoulos complained on Sunrise that Australians had made a poor show of protesting to him - possibly one of the more authentic things he's said in public life.

He described the minimal ire he had managed to drum up as "very lacklustre and disappointing and ineffective".

"Six hundred people - I'm almost embarrassed to have such little opposition."

Keep up the good work people, greet this bore with the snores he deserves.